The Artist Caitlin Johnstone

As well as being an accomplished political portrait painter, Caitlin Johnstone writes on Substack about how she sees the world. I’ve decided to share one of her short pieces here because to me it reveals the inner workings of the artist.

Artists are often silenced by authoritarian regimes because we look and look again and challenge what we see. That’s basically the artistic process in a nutshell. Seeing is the essential fundamental skill – more important than depicting, portraying or rendering. We are obsessive, relentless truth seekers, seeking to see the world without mediation – we are born with this ability. Our experience and training hone these skills until everywhere we look, everything is exposed. “The artist sees with x-ray eyes”. So it’s no surprise to find that bubbling beneath the surface of many artists is a rolling sea of truths, jostling, boiling and pushing to break the surface. For this reason, Caitlin is possibly my favourite writer. You can read more of her work on Substack but here’s a taste:

“What radicalized you?”

– By Caitlin Johnstone

I dunno man maybe it was all the wars based on lies or the corporate ecocide or the live-streamed genocide or the people sleeping on sidewalks while billionaires become trillionaires or the plundering of the global south or the mass surveillance or the police drones or the Israeli torture prisons or the IDF rape dogs or the starvation sanctions or the proxy wars or the acts of nuclear brinkmanship or the encircling of our planet with hundreds of US military bases or the CIA black sites or the Epstein files or the government secrecy or the increasing persecution of journalists and whistleblowers or the fact that the US just openly assassinates and kidnaps the leaders of sovereign nations or the internet censorship or the way all western media and all Silicon Valley tech platforms operate as propaganda services for the US empire or the aggressive push to outlaw pro-Palestine demonstrations or the legalized corruption of western governments or the way AI is being shoved down our throats while data centers choke our ecosystem or the thinly disguised rush to develop militarized robots for domestic use or the glaring plot holes in the official 9/11 story or the glaring plot holes in the official October 7 story or the complete impotence of electoral politics in an oligarchy where the rich get everything they want or the vanishing ice caps or the vanishing rainforests or the vanishing wildlife or the plummeting insect population or the ocean desertification or the giant continent of plastic in the North Atlantic or the microplastics in our brains and in our blood or the fact that we live under a globe-spanning empire that cannot exist without mass-scale violence and exploitation or the fact that younger generations are economically far worse off than their parents and grandparents or the fact that ordinary people are having to work harder and harder as everything gets more and more expensive while the capitalist class reaps record profits?

At this point “What radicalized you?” is a much less interesting question to ask people than “Why aren’t you radicalized yet? Seriously, how is that possible? How have you successfully managed to avoid conversion to a radical political worldview despite everything you are seeing right in front of your eyes?”

Because to the rest of us, that shit looks like a goddamn magic trick. It looks like a superhuman feat of willpower to continue believing everything’s basically okay and our leaders will sort this all out for us if we just vote for the correct plutocratic meat puppet in the next election. You’re just chilling out while everything burns, like that Buddhist monk sitting calmly in meditation after setting himself on fire. How are you even doing that?